Pantsuit in the Back of the Closet

Nerissa Nields wrote the poems for The Pantsuit in the Back of the Closet as part of a fundraiser for Center for New Americans called 30 Poems in November. The collection begins with the narrator watching her daughter climb onto a bus headed for sleep-away camp for the first time. What follows is a series of meditations on anxiety, mortality, femininity, and the seismic shock that was the election of 2016. She ends with a Jobian rant at the Divine which circles back to an image of her child...